Why the Dickey Amendment should have done what they said it did
And, perhaps more importantly, why is should happen all over again
In 1996, the Dickey Amendment seemed pretty straightforward. It basically said that the CDC couldn’t use taxpayer money to advocate gun control.
Not a horrific thing, in and of itself, but the CDC decided that meant that they couldn’t fund gun research.
For decades, gun control advocates decried the Dickey Amendment saying it was costing people’s lives because we couldn’t gather much-needed data on gun violence.
In 2020, funding for such research was including the the budget, effectively ending the Dickey Amendment, or at least how it was perceived, and it was a colossal mistake.
Why do I say that? Well, there are a number of reasons.
To start with, the Dickey Amendment never actually said anything about gun research. It didn’t prohibit scientific inquiry. The CDC simply said it did and acted accordingly.
What this meant, at least by implication, was that gun research was actually gun control advocacy. It wasn’t an unbiased search for the truth but an effort to use taxpayer money to advance a political position.
Of course, that was just my take. No one at the CDC actually said as much.
Yet let’s look at the reality for a moment.
First, let’s look at the state of gun research.
In 2022, Reason sat down with Bloomberg columnist Aaron Brown to produce a video regarding the state of gun research. The conclusion? Most of it was worthless. Here are some of the low lights:
There has been a massive research effort going back decades to determine whether gun control measures work. A 2020 analysis by the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, parsed the results of 27,900 research publications on the effectiveness of gun control laws. From this vast body of work, the RAND authors found only 123 studies, or 0.4 percent, that tested the effects rigorously. Some of the other 27,777 studies may have been useful for non-empirical discussions, but many others were deeply flawed.
We took a look at the significance of the 123 rigorous empirical studies and what they actually say about the efficacy of gun control laws.
The answer: nothing. The 123 studies that met RAND's criteria may have been the best of the 27,900 that were analyzed, but they still had serious statistical defects, such as a lack of controls, too many parameters or hypotheses for the data, undisclosed data, erroneous data, misspecified models, and other problems.
So yeah, there are issues.
One of my favorite parts of this discussion revolves around permit-to-purchase laws. The idea is that you need to have a permit in order to lawfully buy a firearm. The argument is that studies show that it causes a reduction in homicides.
Now, that doesn’t make a lot of sense considering most criminals aren’t buying guns lawfully anyway, but that’s what the research said.
What’s telling is why it said it.
One prominent study, which was touted from the debate stage by Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) when he was running for president in the 2016 election, made the astounding claim that a permit requirement for handgun purchases in Connecticut reduced their gun murder rate by 40 percent. It is true that the state's gun murder rate fell rapidly after that law was passed in 1995, but so did gun murder rates throughout the country. The study's 40 percent claim is the actual murder rate in Connecticut compared to something the researchers call "synthetic Connecticut," which they constructed for the purpose of their study—a combination of mostly Rhode Island, but also Maryland, California, Nevada, and New Hampshire.
As it turns out, the authors' entire claimed effect (the 40 percent reduction they reported) was due to the fact that Rhode Island experienced a temporary spate of about 20 extra murders between 1999 and 2003, and synthetic Connecticut was more than 72 percent Rhode Island.
Even compared to synthetic Connecticut, the decline the authors found didn't last. Although the law remained on the books, by 2006, the gun murder rate in real Connecticut had surpassed synthetic Connecticut, and then continued to increase to the point where it was 46 percent higher. The authors, despite publishing in 2015, elected to ignore data from 2006 and afterwards.
So gun control research has serious problems. While this was published in 2022 at Reason, it looks at studies pre-2020. In other words, these studies were conducted prior to the end of the Dickey Amendment’s supposed prohibition on gun research.
It seems that despite the federal prohibition on taxpayer-funded research on the subject, there was quite a lot of research being conducted.
Now, one could try to argue that if the CDC were funding it, they could require more academic rigor. I wouldn’t hold your breath, though.
You see, the good folks at the CDC have pronounced biases. We know this because, in 2022, they removed a study from their factsheet on defensive gun uses that went against the gun control narrative. Why? Because gun control advocates asked them to.
See, the Dickey Amendment didn’t actually prevent the CDC from funding gun violence research, but it should have. It’s not because the research shouldn’t be done, but because neither the researchers nor the CDC itself can’t be trusted to do it.
Since they can’t, then the least we can do is end the idea of taxpayer money funding this kind of research, as well as any other research found to be approached in such a heavily biased manner.
Frankly, no one should, but I can’t decide what other people do with their money. I have no say in what they do. If they want to squander it, so be it.
But tax dollars are different. Most of us pay into them and so we deserve a say.
When those tax dollars are being used in such a way as to try and advance a political position that seeks to infringe on a right that “shall not be infringed,” we have an issue.
The Dickey Amendment didn’t prevent anything. It most definitely should have.
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